Hello my fellow blogger's and blog readers. I can't believe its March already!! I work in finance, so March for us here in NZ means financial year end; which means ALOT of work! But I think its ok because I have been through it once before, second time round I should be much better equipped!

Summer is sadly coming to an end. I can feel the nights getting shorter. NOOO. But I still try to get out and about to make the most of the sunlight.

February was a great month. I got alot of feedback on the photos I took while touring round the Whakatane region. Doug also mentioned to me that my photos are starting to get quite good. Now I suppose he has to say that being my partner haha., but I thought, gosh, its probably time I get onto improving my work flow and get a watermark.

Youtube really is a great source for learning all things photoshop. I have learnt so much from watching Youtube tutorials. I found a tutorial that shows you how to add a simple watermark to a batch of photos. Exactly what I was looking for! Now at least if people decide to save my photos for "whatever" I can have my name on them at least. So from now on, the photos I will be posting on Facebook and on this blog, will have my name: Kirsten Andersen Photography. Awwww what. lol. Its simple text but I actually like it. It does the job.

I got together again with my little photography club a couple of weeks ago. HAHA - still cracks me up so cute :-). The three of us. We had a great time at North head. It was my turn to choose the location and fortunately for us the weather was perfect. Not a cloud in the sky. Steph was so kind again to let us use some of her gear. I got my frills because she let us use her speedlites. I will definitely be getting one of those in the near future. The speedlites with the heads that swivel (like Steph's) allow you to point the light in almost any direction you desire. This is fantastic! This means that you can bounce the light off walls, basically anything! I was like a little kid with a new toy! Using these in the tunnels on North Head was so much fun. I got to see what it actually looks like under there. The speedlites reach much further than the on-camera flash.

Anyway here are some of the shots I took. You may now notice my watermark in the bottom left corner. I like this font, very casual yet elegant - just like me I suppose. HAHA.

The following photo (and also the photos above except for the first one I think) is using Steph's wide angle lens. I must say, I LOVE THIS lens. When I become rich (haha) I probably would love to buy one of these! But they aren't cheap that's why I say.."when" I'm rich.

And these two photos below were taken using Steph's macro rings. You can buy a set of these for around $100-$200 I've been told, which is extremely affordable! Once I get myself a 50mm prime I can get some macro rings and get some more practise at macro photography. I think macro shots are so so pretty. You have a ginormous depth of field - which confused me at first because I was like, why isn't it getting in focus haha (noob). If you see the photo below it is actually incredibly sharp its just focussing on such a tiny object that the rest of it will be blurred out. These remind me of the default desktop wallpapers you get.

Ok, I just looooove green.

I have a few photo's of the plants below now. Not sure what they are but the pattern they have is so cool.

And then the sunset came. We had met up around 5pm at North Head and because its summer here in NZ, we still had quite a few hours to kill. Which isn't hard, just give Kirsten a speedlite and she'll be entertained for hours HAHA. Eventually the sunset did come and it was beautiful. The photo's I think speak pretty good volumes. Imagine the real thing!

Tip of the week: This week's tip is a bit of a general tip about composition. Now composition I believe is and can be very subjective. One person may like one way of framing a shot and another person may not! But a problem I see alot of people making, is that they don't frame their shots very well. They tend to leave alot of empty space in a picture. Now sometimes photographer's do this intentionally but generally I think that cropping your pictures to better frame your subject really makes your shot that much better. Especially with portraits, its better to frame the picture with peoples faces in the upper third of the photo, not smack bang in the middle with alot of space above their heads. Also generally having people stand to the side when taking pictures with backgrounds is better than framing the shot with people directly in the middle. You might think this is common sense but I notice alot of people do not pay attention to this stuff! Try it out and see if you like the results. And if you don't always get the perfect composition first time, you can of course crop it once you are back at your computer.

But as they always say, rules are made to be broken, continue to experiment!